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Old 03-05-2011, 02:00 PM
 
Location: Portland, OR
1,657 posts, read 4,469,186 times
Reputation: 907

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On Portland's West Slope and into Washington County where Frontier has a toehold it took over from Verizon, it seems new customers face a $500.00 installation fee:
Newspaper article:
Frontier pulls out of cable TV franchises, hikes installation charges dramatically | OregonLive.com

Monthly fees may jump from $65 to $95 per month.

The more I read about Frontier, the more I question if they ever did an honest business plan before buying up Verizon's stake in the Western side of the Portland area.

Phil
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Old 03-07-2011, 04:42 PM
 
Location: Portland, OR
1,082 posts, read 2,394,647 times
Reputation: 1271
I'm one of those people who switched from Comcast to Verizon when the latter put FiOS in our neighborhood, and who was involuntarily switched to Frontier when Verizon sold their non-cellphone business to them. I've read the few news reports on this, and I don't entirely understand the situation. From what I read, FiOS was in only a few of the areas where Frontier bought Verizon's business. Frontier claims that FiOS TV customers represent only a tiny percentage of their business, that it costs them $800 to hook up a FiOS customer (so they'll still be losing $300 on a $500 hookup), they didn't snag away as much of Comcast's business as they'd hoped, and TV content is much more expensive than they'd thought. Either they're lying and had planned to dump their TV business all along, or they didn't do their due diligence and aren't very good businesspeople. The question I have is whether they plan to get out of the TV-content business for their entire customer base, or only for their FiOS customers. If it's the former, it seems like they risk angering all of their customers who subscribe to TV content. If so, I suspect many people will switch to the competition for all of their TV/Internet/land-line needs -- unless, of course, Frontier has no competition (other than satellite) in most of the areas they serve.

I don't know what I'm going to do when my current Frontier contract runs out. I have a low triple-play discount, and I love the high-speed FiOS Internet speeds. My first reaction is to switch back to Comcast, despite the slower Internet speeds. I never had issues with Comcast, and cable Internet speeds were fast enough for me back then. On the other hand, I checked Comcast's rates, and their triple-play doesn't look like it will be much cheaper than Frontier's will be with the rate hike, assuming Frontier just raises its TV rates and doesn't leave the TV business entirely. Honestly, if the handful of cable channels I watch were available over Internet TV, I'd dump cable/FiOS TV entirely.
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Old 03-07-2011, 07:04 PM
 
Location: the Beaver State
6,464 posts, read 13,395,671 times
Reputation: 3581
High speed Internet in the Portland area is highly segmented due to historical non-compete contracts via the phone companies. Verizon used to handle all of Portland. Qwest would handle most of the 'burbs.

Comcast was able to come in with the cable side of things, to compete against the DSL offerings from Qwest and Verizon and have done pretty well doing so.

The biggest problem is that Portland just isn't a big enough metropolis to really due FIOS right. Add in the fact that 75% of the Internet access in the greater Portland area runs through the basement of the Pittock building (which was over capacity 15 years ago,) and we start seeing these types of issues.

But now Comcast is starting to oversubscribe certain areas - older neighborhoods like mine will crawl to a snails pace at night as the local infrastructure is over saturated by my neighbors.
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